© 2004 Somiotoxtio) reserved, © 2002 Les ditions de Minuit, 7, ue Bernard-Palissy, 75008 Pars. 501 Philosophy Hall Columbia University "Now York, NY 10027 During, were aso invaluable, nis to Gianeato Ambrosia, Eri Eich, Teal Ech, Ames Hodges, Patici Feral, net Metcalfe foe roading and suggestions 212 by Glanearlo Ambrosino. ISB 1-58435.0180 wonronase Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 Gilles Deleuze Edited by David Lapoujade ied by Michael TaorminaIntroduction st volume gathers together almost all the texts which Gilles Deleuze France and abroad between 1953 and 1974, starting with Empiri- n and Subjectiviey, his frst book, and ending with the debates following Oedipus, co-authored with Félix Guattari, This collection essentially con- ns book reviews, prefaces, interviews, and conferences all previously French, but not found in any one work by Deleuce. avoid any bias as to order or emphasis, I have respected the publication (not of composition). A thematic organization he previous collection Negotiations, as well as the bib- idertaken around 1989," bur it might have erroneously s collection constituted a book “by” Deleuze, ot at least one “ct 1 publication specified by Deleuze have been respected: ished or posthumous texts. this volume are all mentioned in the ished between 1975 and 1995: Tivo d other texts (Deus régimes de fous et anaes textes). —David LapoujadeDesert Islands say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for ion because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor ly case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mychol- id, Continental islands are accidental, de hey ate separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, the absorption of what once contained them, Oceanic inary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and i organism. Others emerge from underwater eruptions, bring- of day a movement from the lowest depths. Some rise slow! n return, leaving us no time to annex them. These wo inental and originary, reveal a profound opposition taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest ands, thac the carth is still there, under the sea, gathering displaying epulkon for one anothe. In this we land is deserted must appear philo- security, unless theyDeserr Istanps aNp OTHER TEXTS bout the two kinds of islands, jother way. The élan that But everything that geography has tol the imagination knew already on its own and draws humans toward islands extends the double movement that produces islands in themselves. Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in feat, it dosn't matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the conti- nent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Certainly, separating and creating are not mutually exclusive: one has to hold one’s own when one is separated, and had better be separate to create anews nevertheless, one of the two tendencies always predominates. In this way, the ‘movement of the imagination of islands takes up the movement of their pro- duction, but they don't have the same objective. It is the same movement, but a different goal. It is no longer the island that is separated from the continent, ic is humans who find themselves separated from the world when on an island. It is no longer the island that is created from the bowels of the earch through the liquid depths, ic is humans who create the world anew from the island and on the warers. Humans thus take up for themselves both movements of the island and are able to do so on an island that, precisely, lacks one kind of move- ‘ment: humans can drift toward an island that is nonetheless originary, and they can create on an island that has merely drifted away. On closer inspection, we find here a new reason for every island to be and remain in theory deserted. An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because itis inhabited. While itis erue that the movement of humans toward and on the island takes up the movement of the island prior 10 humankind, some people can occupy the land—it is still desereed, all the more so, provided they are sufficiently, chat \bsolutely separate, and provided they are sufficient, absolute creators. Cet- tainly, this is never the case in fact, though people who are shipwrecked approach such a condition. But for this to be the case, we need only extrapo- late in imagination the movement they bring with them to the island. Only appearance does such a movement put an end to the island’s desertedness; reality, it takes up and prolongs the dlan that produced the island as deserted Far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point, In certain conditions which attach them to the very moveme of things, humans do not put an end co desertedness, they make ie sacred Those people who come to the island indeed occupy and popu reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, the island only a,dynamic image of itself, a consciousness of t [Desert ISLANDS For this to be the case, there is again but one condition: humans would have to reduce themselves to the movement that brings them to the island, the movement which prolongs and takes up the élan that produced the island. ‘Then geography and the imagination would be one, To that question so dear to the old explorers—‘which creatures live on deserted islands?”—one could only answer: human beings live there already, but uncommon humans, they are absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a pro- torype, a man who would almost be a god, a woman who would be a goddess, a great Amnesiac, a pute Artist, a consciousness of Earth and Ocean, an enor- mous hurricane, a beautiful witch, a statue from the Easter Islands. There you have a human being who precedes itself. Such a creature on a deserted island would be the deserted island itself, insofar as i¢ imagines and reflects itself in first movement. A consciousness of the earth and ocean, such is the desere- ed island, ready to begin the world anew. But since human beings, even ily, are not identical to the movement that puts them on the island, are unable to join with the élan that produces the island; they always ncer it from the outside, and theie presence in fact spoils its desertedness. unity of the deserted island and its inhabitant is thus not actual, only like the idea of looking behind the curtain when one is not behind portantly, i is doubtful whether the individual imagination, unaid- | raise itself up to such an admirable identity; ic would require the igination, what is most profound in it i. rites and mythology. we facts themselves we find at least a negative confirmation of all this, what a deserted island is in reality, that is, geographically. The an extremely poor or weak jective unity, and deserted islands have even less. The desert- re extremely poor soil. Deserted, the island may be a Phe real desert is uninhabited only insofar as it pre- that by rights would make life possible, whether vegetable, contrary, the lack of inhabitants on the deserted due to circumstance, in other words, the island’ sur- at the sea surrounds and what we travel around. Ie is round. It is as chough the island had ed is the ocean around it. eis by vireue the principle on which the islandDesexr IsLANDs AND Ore Texts, situation, we would have to overhaul the general distribution of the continents, the state of the seas, and the lines of navigy ‘This is to stare once again that the essence of the deserted island is imag- inary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into existence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths, Ie is at this very moment literature begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that con- sciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes. One would have to show exactly how in this sense mythology fails and dies in two classic novels of the desert- ed island, Robinson and Suzanne. Suzanne and the Pacific emphasizes the sepatated aspect of islands, the separation of the young woman who finds her- self there;! Robinson Crusoe, the creative aspect, the beginning anew. It is true that the way mythology fails is different in each case. In the case of Giraudoux’s Suzanne, mythology dies the prettiest, most graceful death. In Robinson’s case, its death is heavy indeed. One can hardly imagine a more boring novel, and ic is sad to sce children still reading it today. Robinson's vision of the ‘world resides exclusively in property; never have we seen an owner more ready to preach. The mythical recreation of the world from the deserted island gives way to the reconstitution of everyday bourgeois life from a reserve of capital Everything is taken from the ship. Nothing is invented. It is all painstakingly applied on the island. Time is nothing but the time necessary for capital to produce a benefit as the outcome of work. And the providential function of God is to guarantee a return, God knows his people, the hardworking honest type, by their beautiful properties, and the evil doers, by their poorly main- tained, shabby property. Robinson's companion is not Eve, but Friday, docile towards work, happy 0 be a slave, and too easily disgusted by cannibalism. Any healthy reader would dream of secing him eat Robinson. Robinson Crusoe represents the best illustration of that thesis which affirms the close ties between capitalism and Protestantism. The novel develops the failure and the death of mythology in Puritanism. Things are quite different with Suza In her case, the deserted island is a depository of ready-made ‘objects. The island beats immediately what i has taken civilization centuries l dies, though in Suzanne’ Suzanne has nothing to create anew. he double of every object from the city le without consistency, separated to produce, perfect, an ase it dies in a parti Desert ISLANDS on in human relations, amidst buying and selling, exchanges and presents. She is an insipid young woman. Her companions are not Adam, but young cadavers, and when she reenters the world of living men, she will love them in a uniform way, like a priest, as though love were the minimum threshold of her perception. What must be recovered is the mythological life of the deserted island. However, in its very failure, Robinson gives us some indication: he first need- ced a reserve of capital, In Suzanne's case, she was frst and foremost separate. ‘And neither the one nor the other could be part of a couple. These three indi- ‘cations must be restored to their mythological purity. We have to get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul. First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin, From it everything, begins anew. The island is the necessary minimum for this re-beginning, the ‘material that survives the first origin, the radiating seed or egg that must be sufficient to re-produce everything. Clearly, this presupposes that the forma- tion of the world happens in two stages, in two periods of time, birth and re-birch, and that the second is just as necessary and essential as the first, and. thus the first is necessarily compromised, born for renewal and already renounced in a catastrophe. Ie is not that there is a second birth because there has been a catastrophe, but the reverse, there is a catastrophe after the origin because there must be, from the beginning, a second birth. Within ourselves ‘we can locate the source of such a theme: it is not the production of life that we look for when we judge it to be life, but its reproduction. The animal whose mode of reproduction remains unknown co us has not yet caken its place among living beings. It is not enough that everything begin, everything must, begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion. ‘The second moment does not succeed the first: it is the reappearance of the first when the cycle of the other moments has been completed. The second ori- is thus more essential than the first, since it gives us the law of repetition, of the series, whose first origin gave us only moments. But this theme, more than in our fantasies, finds expression in every mythology. It is well as the myth of the flood. ‘The ark sets down on the one place on earth uncovered by wate, a circular and sacred plac, from wl dry. Here we is concentrated in a holy of the world is more‘Desert ISLANDS AND OTHER TEXTS expanse of the flood. Ocean and water embody a principle of segregation such that, on sacred islands, exclusively female communities can come to be, such as the island of Circe or Calypso. Afterall, che b ig started from God and from a couple, but not the new beginning, the beginning again, which starts idea of a meaning, the survival of a in a world that is slow to re-begin. In the ideal of beginning anew ing that precedes the beginning itself, chat cakes it up to deepen Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ Jean Hyppolite’s earlier Genesis and Seructure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ‘was a commentary on Hegel, preserving Hegel in its entirety.* The intention bbchind Hyppolite’s new book is quite different.’ Investigating Logic, Phenom- enology, and the Encyclopedia, Hyppolite starts from a precise idea to make a precise point: Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be anything ele; but there is no ontology of exence, there is only an antology of sense. Vere we hax “s thesis ‘philosophy is ontology’ means one thing above al sophy is not anthropology. Anthropology aspires to be a discourse on humanity. As such Reflection is on one side, while being is on the other, which is not a movement of is thus the power to llows thar empiri- id Formal. It ely sends us back to formalism, just as formalism refers back to . “Empirical consciousness is a consciousness directed at preexiste ity will thus be treated as